FATTENING WALL STREET — Mike Whitney reports on the rapid metamorphosis of new Fed Chair Janet Yallin into a lackey for the bankers, bond traders and brokers. The New Religious Wars Over the Environment: Joyce Nelson charts the looming confrontation between the Catholic Church and fundamentalists over climate change, extinction and GMOs; A People’s History of Mexican Constitutions: Andrew Smolski on the 200 year-long struggle of Mexico’s peasants, indigenous people and workers to secure legal rights and liberties; Spying on Black Writers: Ron Jacobs uncovers the FBI’s 50 year-long obsession with black poets, novelists and essayists; O Elephant! JoAnn Wypijewski on the grim history of circus elephants; PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on birds and climate change; Chris Floyd on the US as nuclear bully; Seth Sandronsky on Van Jones’s blind spot; Lee Ballinger on musicians and the State Department; and Kim Nicolini on the films of JC Chandor.

Had enough of free elections yet? On the heels of the Torricelli for Lautenburg substitution by New Jersey Democrats, the Republicans in far-flung Montana have countered with an eleventh-hour switcheroo of their own. The October 10 BILLINGS GAZETTE reports...

I woke up early to the news today and wish sleep carried me a little longer. In much poetry, dawn represents the breaking of the methaphorical night of loneliness, a respite from pain. But for the Iraqi people, this is not that dawn. In an early morning vot...

Ordinarily I would not use this term. But when I came across the article “Dry Drunk” – – Is Bush Making a Cry for Help? in American Politics Journal by Alan Bisbort, I was ready to concede, in the case of George W. Bush, the phrase may be q...

Since the terrorist attacks on Sept 11, many high-ranking leaders of the religious right in America have been quite vocal attacking Islam, the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad in the public square. With a few exceptions, American columnists, intellectuals and pol...

Once thought to be among the most uncritically patriotic of communities, Mexican Americans created a massive antiwar movement during the Viet Nam period. Since that time, corporate and government managers have sought to erase this history in order to replace it wi...

SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD (text Of A Speech On The Senate Floor, Delivered October 9, 2002)

Many of us have spent months reviewing the issue of the advisability of invading Iraq in the near future. From hearings and meetings on the process and the very important role of Congress to the difficult questions of substance, including foreign policy and military impli...

You may feel disgusted by the hypocrisy of US plans to make war on Iraq and sickened at the inevitable slaughter of thousands of people. But if you could only vaguely recall the details of how deep the hypocrisy goes, then read on. The US not only helped ar...

A bit of history… Democracy stands and falls with the freedom of public opinion. In part, this freedom is defined in relation to established powers, especially political authority. Public opinion has to be independent. This is how it was understood at...

On October 1, Dubya’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, delivered a speech at the exclusive Waldorf Astoria in New York. Members of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research were in attendance. The Manhattan Institute is a CIA-sponsored far righ...

RIO DE JANEIRO. From the air, the ‘cidade maravilhosa’ was not so much draped in red as blanketed in white. Millions of paper backgrounds, pieces of political propaganda, stickers, pamphlets, slips and posters, shot back light to the spring sun. Some w...

In his Cincinnati address, before an audience of 700 hand-selected yea-sayers, President Bush pushed once again his third foreign policy doctrine: the UN must enforce its resolutions or become irrelevant leaving the correction of world problems to the Emperor of ...

For nearly a year, I have been investigating Army Secretary Thomas White’s role in Enron’s demise, specifically, whether he was aware of the financial machinations that went on in the division he ran, Enron Energy Services, and if he took part in a sch...

Although I am an Israeli academic, I have long and deep ties to America. I have spent several years on both coasts of the United States. American publishers have published all of my books and most of my professional papers. Almost all of my non-Israeli professiona...

In 1989 Benjamin Netanyahu told students at Bar-Ilan University: “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories...

Here’s why I’m against the UN as promoter of federalism and world guv’mint. This just in from Geneva, Switzerland, via Reuter’s wire: “U.N. upholds French ban on ‘dwarf throwing’.” It turns out that a diminutive stun...

Here’s a chilling thought: what if we don’t go to war with Iraq? I know, that’s the kind of crazy pessimistic talk that causes people to drink snifters of benzene. But we need to at least consider the idea, if only from a distance, poking it with...

I just read a recent article in The Nation, ‘The Left and 9/11′ (September 23, 2002) by Adam Shatz, which purports to be a measured analysis of the differences between the so-called ‘Left’ in the United States over the war in Afghanistan an...

A mobile watchtower, lifted into the air by a crane, surveys Khan Yunis day and night. An ambulance from the city waits behind a nearby concrete building day after day; it waits so that the next child shot for playing too close to the wall can make it to the local...

Israel is worried about its image these days. With scenes of Israeli soldiers in full battle regalia beating young boys at checkpoints, shooting at stone-throwing children and bulldozing homes and orchards, the Israeli army is looking as though it just stepped out...

“I know a place where there’s still something going on,” sings Bob Dylan on Love and Theft. The current tour proves him right. The place is wherever he and his crack band happen to be standing. What’s going on is the serious business of roc...

Dr. Bob Rajcoomar is a 54-year old Florida doctor of Indian descent and former U.S. Army Major. Recently, Dr. Rajcoomar and his wife took a flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia, during which air marshals subdued and restrained an “unruly” passenger....

Corporate malfeasance and take-overs aren’t going to be the topics of debate in this fall’s election, in fact they probably won’t even be brought up. The war in Iraq on the other hand will be a top contender, and as usual the debate will be archa...

George Bush got one thing right in his speech Monday night — that “many Americans have raised legitimate questions” about his mad rush to war with Iraq. But he continues to misunderstand what the American people and the rest of the world w...

I share the same revulsion that many others have toward Saddam Hussein. We all know that he is brutal and that his regime has terrorized the Iraqi people and the peoples of nearby countries. But there was a time not so long ago when, despite all of this, we...

Who doesn’t remember the picture: a Jew is put on trial in Moscow as a Zionist spy. Family members and friends come to observe the trial but are turned away. No place left, they are told, all the seats have already been taken. And indeed, KGB agents have fil...

On October 6, the anniversary eve of the commencement of last year’s bombing in Afghanistan, multitudes of people converged in population centers across the United States. Their purpose was simple: to tell our government, loudly and unequivocally, “Not...

Most summers, I manage to decamp for a few weeks to the country where I grew up. Much as I try to avoid them, comparisons between the ancestral place, England, and the adopted one, the USA, do crop up. This year there was a moment of cultural transition when, twen...

“So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver-no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t ...

Psychologists have learned to recognize projection, placing on another impulses one denies in oneself. Understanding projections requires openness, even modesty. A self-effacing attitude is the only way one can understand that what we are accusing another person o...

The recent dishonest, consciously distorted and insulting non-interpretation of my poem, “Somebody Blew Up America” by the “Anti-Defamation” League, is fundamentally an attempt to defame me. And with that, an attempt to repress and stigmati...

A newsletter for former intelligence officers (no, I am not one, I just read it) contained two requests this week from researchers. One is a Washington Post intelligence reporter who wants information about “that particular moment in a clandestine agent̵...

During the late 1960s and early 1970s the Brazilian military-led government engaged in a major spending spree. Roads were built everywhere, huge infrastructure projects were initiated, and a major transformation of the economy took place. At the same time, international ...

Sixty years ago, the Jews of Europe were at the lowest point of their collective existence. Herded like cattle into trains, they were transported from the rest of Europe by Nazi soldiers into death camps where they were systematically exterminated in gas ovens. Th...

On September 7th, a gender-variant crowd of West Village Street youth, drag queens, anarchists, and local vagabonds, led by FIERCE! and the Radical Faeries, pounded drums and paraded in platform shoes in support of the continued presence of young, multiracial quee...

While international election-junkies get their fix analysing polls and results in Germany, Brazil and the US, they’re only now beginning to notice the referendum due to take place on October 19th here on Europe’s offshore isle. At the risk of appearing...

The people who taught me to love jazz and blues and rock’n’roll as the perfect synthesis of the silly and the serious taught me to love poetry. The main ones I’m thinking of are Bob Rudnick, an unsung hero whose tale deserves a lengthy telling I ...

I’ve long had an image of Alan Dershowitz as the legal avatar of the Wicked Queen in Snow White. I don’t mean I imagine him in drag going around poisoning people. It’s just that all those times I heard him sniping about William Kunstler back when...

Coincidental, no doubt, but one day after Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer’s comment on putting a bullet into the sovereign ruler of Iraq’s head, five US citizens in a suburb of Washington, DC, lost their lives in just that manner while innocently going ab...

Dear Junior Well, I must say that you should thank me, and you owe me one. I was one of those responsible for your election in 2000. I’m a Floridian who did not vote for you, but helped you win all the more. That’s right Junior, I voted for Nade...

How depressing it is to learn that there are guides to almost everything imaginable today from college and open-heart surgery to bass fishing, Disneyland, prostitution, funerals, dog training, oil and gas deals, household staffing, tandem cycling and even the Yell...

My dearly departed friend and comrade Ron Rosenthal was arrested only once during our relationship. He was pounced upon by the police while writing, "STUFF THE WEDDING!" on a concrete wall belonging to the Toronto General Hospital, which paid his wages a...

When it comes to knowledge of the U.S. government, foreign students often put American students to shame. Many of the American students in my classes don1t know how Congress is organized, what cabinet members do, or how governmental powers are divided among the ex...

On September 21, 2002, Tsahal planted the flag bearing King David’s Star on the ruined site of the Palestinian Authority’s compound in Ramallah. Whether done by order or through the folly of a hyper-patriotic shocktrooper, the symbolism of the act brou...

Palestinian patriot, Marwan Barghouti, is on trial before a three judge panel court in Tel Aviv. Israel has charged him with organizing terrorist attacks that have killed 26 people. This saga actually started over two years ago. Then, the scheming Ariel Sha...

October 20, 1990–Twelve years ago almost to the day I was at a rally in Olympia, Washington that was called to oppose the upcoming war against Iraq. Back then, we were told by the administration in DC that the reason for that war was to drive Iraq from Kuwai...